Launchpad Answer Tracker

Important

This document has been migrated from help.launchpad.net as is, and has not yet been revised. The content might be outdated, links and images could be broken. We are aware and will fix any issues as soon as possible.

One key to making a free software project thrive is building a community of dedicated users. An important aspect of this is making it easy for users to get help in learning to use and master the product.

Mailing lists, web forums and IRC are great places to find help with free software. Usually, you’ll find someone who can answer your question or, at the very least, point you in the direction of a useful web page.

These methods of finding and giving help have a couple of shortcomings, though:

  • there’s no way to track the progress of a question

  • knowledge about the software is spread across different places.

Launchpad Answers helps to solve these problems by:

  • tracking user questions in a similar way to bug reports

  • notifying volunteer support contacts of new questions

  • building a searchable knowledge base of good answers

  • allowing people to ask questions and offer support in different languages.

It also serves as a simple ticketing system for tracking admin requests.

Key Features

Launchpad Integration: The Answer Tracker is available for all hosted projects. You can also use the existing Team infrastructure to organize the support community.

Guided Filing: When a user asks a new question, a search is done through the existing questions to try to find similar ones. This helps users get answers faster and reduces the number of similar questions in the tracker.

Multi-lingual Support: Users can ask questions in their native languages. People answering questions can choose which languages they want to support. This feature makes it easy to build native-language support community. Support as many languages as your users speak!

Detailed Workflow: The status of questions is tracked automatically based on the actions people take on it. This makes it easy to track which questions still need an answer and which need input from the user.

Searchable Reports: Various reports are offered making it easy to find the questions you are interested in. The Open report is perfect for users looking for a question still needing an answer. The Answered report is great for users trying to find a solution to their problem. There is also a Need Attention report which shows all the questions that need your input. All these reports are searchable.

Answer Contacts: Dedicated users can register as answer contacts to receive email notifications on all questions. These people are the backbone of your user support community.

Email Integration: The answer tracker is very well integrated with email. Users posting a question receive replies on it by email. Any users can also subscribe to questions to receive notifications when new messages are added to the question. It is even possible to post replies to existing questions by email.

Bug Links: Questions can be linked to bug reports. This makes it easy to build a two-layer bug reporting process where more knowledgeable users can identify and file bugs from questions.

Launchpad Answers for your project

If you’re a project owner, you can use Launchpad Answers to provide support to the users of your software and to build a knowledge base about your software.

First, activate Answers for your project by selecting People can ask questions in Launchpad Answers on the Change details page at https://launchpad.net//+edit. Now, people can ask for help using Launchpad.

Next, encourage members of your community to use Answers. In particular, you should consider encouraging members of your community to become answer contacts.

The Launchpad Answer Tracker offers tools to effectively build a support community around your project. It makes it easy for users to find help by asking questions that can be answered by other users in the community.

More information

Here are some documents that describe how to make the most of the Answer Tracker feature in Launchpad:

1. SupportTrackerTour: a quick tour which shows the main features of the support tracker

2. Answer Tracker Tour: a quick tour which shows the main features of the Answer Tracker.

  1. Asking for help:find out how to use Launchpad to get help with software.

  2. Offering help: how to help other people and become an ..answer contact.

  3. Answer syntax parsing <Comments>